Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg slammed the Biden Administration for censorship, took shots at one of his biggest tech rivals and said he’s “optimistic” about President-elect Donald Trump during a wide-ranging interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan.
Wearing a brown T-shirt and gold-chain, the suddenly conservative-sounding tech tycoon spent the first hour of the nearly three-hour sit-down discussing the strong-arm tactics Team Biden used to silence those who cast doubt on the COVID vaccine – a topic dear to Rogan’s heart.
Biden officials phoned executives at Meta to “scream” and “curse” at them while demanding that they remove any negative posts about the coronavirus vaccine on Facebook, said Zuckerberg, rehashing the the admission he made in front of Congress over the summer.
“It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said during the interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” released Friday.
“The US government should be defending its companies, not be at the tip of the spear attacking its companies,”
When Rogan – who sparked controversy by questioning the efficacy of the vaccines — asked whether those phone calls were recorded, Zuckerberg responded that he didn’t think so.
Zuckerberg said Biden’s aides wanted Meta to remove posts that correctly stated that the vaccines could induce side effects.
“Basically it just got to this point [where we told them], ‘No, we’re not going to take down this thing that was true,’” Zuckerberg said.
He then went on to lavish a bit of praise on Trump.
“I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
The interview with Rogan capped a series of recent head-turning incidents. Last month, the Facebook founder met with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
He also drew criticism from left-leaning circles for adding UFC boss Dana White, a prominent Trump ally, to Meta’s board of directors, as well as ending Meta’s fact-checking program and killing DEI initiatives at the company.
Zuckerberg – who also spent a good chunk of the interview with Rogan discussing their mutual love for jiu-juitsu – did take several swipes at Apple.
He said the iPhone maker hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while.”
Zuckerberg slammed Apple’s practice of charging a 30% fee on transactions within its App Store – a frequent point of criticism for Apple’s competitors and regulators alike.
“The number of sales, I think, has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company?” Zuckerberg said. “They do it by basically squeezing people and having this 30% tax on developers.”
He also took issue with Apple’s practice of having texts sent from non-iPhones appear as “green bubbles” in group messages.
“They’re like, if you don’t have a blue bubble, you’re not cool, and you’re like the out crowd, and then they always wrap it in like security,” Zuckerberg said.
As for White, Zuckerberg told Rogan that he thought the UFC boss was “awesome” and an “amazing entrepreneur” who turned mixed martial arts from an afterthought into a mainstream sport.
“He’s a world-class entrepreneur and he’s got a strong backbone,” Zuckerberg said. “The conversation I had with him around joining our board was, ‘we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company. We need strong people who are gonna basically advise us on how to handle some of these situations.’”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
